


Jupiter

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Justified
Genre: Angst, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-07
Updated: 2019-03-07
Packaged: 2019-11-12 15:25:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18013430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: Boyd's always had big dreams.





	Jupiter

Boyd has big dreams. He thinks they’re going to go to the moon, maybe to Mars, maybe even farther, out to Jupiter’s moons. Not to Jupiter, of course. Jupiter is gaseous, Boyd likes to remind Raylan. It would be an exercise in futility to settle on Jupiter.

Raylan doesn’t say anything about it being an exercise in foolishness to think that two Harlan boys are going to go to the moon, much less beyond. Boyd won’t heed sense. Or he might, and then he’d stop telling Raylan about all the things they’re going to do on the moon, safely ensconced in the biosphere and growing wheat or corn or squash.

“You want to become a farmer, there are easier ways to do it,” Raylan points out, and Boyd makes a face.

“We’re not becoming farmers,” he declares, scandalized. “We’re becoming astronauts! Moonlings!”

“Moonlings?” Raylan repeats, one eyebrow raised, and Boyd has the good sense to look a little sheepish at the word, though not sheepish enough to recant.

“We’re going to make history, Raylan,” Boyd says firmly, building space shuttles out of Thursday’s meatloaf and green beans. “Just you wait and see.”

Raylan’s heard that before. At age three they were going to grow up to be lions—the meanest, biggest lions ever seen. At age five it was pirates, but still the fiercest ones ever to sail the high seas, going to steal from the rich and count their gold and have a parrot for each shoulder. Just you wait and see, Raylan. Two years later it was superheroes. A few years after that it was the President of the United States. Well, Boyd was going to be President, and Raylan was going to be the head of the Secret Service, because look, Raylan, you can carry a gun. Raylan had wanted to be cowboy, like Matt Dillon, but being head of the Secret Service would have to do.

Boyd’s said they were going to be astronauts off and on for years now. Raylan blames the Jetsons, and the fact that Mrs. Crowder tended to conflate Neil Young with Neil Armstrong when she drank.

They’re eighteen that year, high school seniors, and the world lies open before them, a book waiting to be written, history waiting to be made.

Boyd says they need to join the Air Force to learn how to fly airplanes so they can learn how to fly space shuttles. Boyd says maybe they should stop at college first—Harvard or Yale or West Point—and see what all the fuss is about higher learning.

“You think they have classes on moon farming?” Raylan wonders, and he should know better by now, because that only sets Boyd off talking about horticulture and botany and animal husbandry. “We’ve got plenty of animal husbandry in the hills,” Raylan tells him, winking, laughs when Boyd fluffs up just like he anticipated, lecturing Raylan on what animal husbandry actually means.

They’re eighteen and free to do as they please, free to leave Harlan for Houston or DC or the high seas. They’re eighteen and Boyd has grandiose plans, and Raylan shrugs and accepts his part in those plans, whether he’s co-pilot or bodyguard or moon farmer or a lion on the savanna.

They’re eighteen, and Boyd signs up to work in the mines.

Raylan follows him, because Boyd’s staked out a place for Raylan, too, because Raylan’s mapped his life around Boyd’s unreachable, unrealizable dreams, and finds himself at loose ends when those dreams fade like fairy music at daybreak, like fog under the summer sun.

“It’s just for a little while,” Boyd says, but he’s driving them to work a mile from the mine where Raylan’s granddaddy pried coal from seams for thirty years until he died, a mine in the confines of Harlan County not more than ten miles from the four close walls of their homes.

Raylan feels like a pirate ship that’s lost its anchor. He feels like Matt Dillon faced with an outlaw and without his gun. All his organs have sunk down into his belly, leaving his gut heavy and the rest of him hollowed out and ready to pitch over in a breeze.

Boyd had plans. Boyd made plans and Raylan listened and they were going to get out of Harlan, Boyd said. They weren’t going to stop until they’d reached Jupiter’s moons. But they’re eighteen and dressed in new coveralls and old hardhats and taking the elevator down into the dark, down to pry coal from Harlan’s black heart.

“This is just to amass some funds,” Boyd says on their lunch break, stealing the fried chicken Frances had packed for Raylan. “Then we’re off to make history, Raylan. We’re going to take the world by storm.”

Raylan nods, the same way he’s been nodding along to Boyd’s plans for almost twenty years. But his chest aches where it’s been freshly hollowed out with Emulex and pickaxes, his dreams—Boyd’s dreams—nothing but backfill in a deep mine.

“When are you gonna run for President?” he asks, and Boyd doesn’t seem to notice that Raylan’s voice catches on the barren words.

“Why Raylan, you know you have to be thirty-five to run for President. First, we’ll be astronauts. Then, I’ll become Governor of Kentucky. You can manage my campaign. Then it’s on to the presidency. By the time we’re forty, Raylan, we’ll be living it up in the White House. Just you wait and see.”

Raylan’s already seen. He’s covered in coal dust, breathing it out of the air and spitting it into the black. He’s eighteen and just like every other fool in Harlan County, no different than his daddy but for the fact that Raylan is digging coal instead of breaking knees.

“When are we getting out of Harlan?” Raylan asks, though he knows the answer from the coal lumps weighing down his chest.

He knows the answer, but he still waits almost a year for Boyd Crowder, keeps measuring out his future with impossible dreams. Then the mine caves in, and they’re almost nineteen and dead, nineteen and never going to see twenty, never going to make history. Never going to do a goddamned thing but die a few miles from the place they were born, coal in their lungs and coal lining their coffins and not a word written about them besides the headstones bearing their names.

“When are we getting out of Harlan?” Raylan whispers, and Boyd answers with a desperate kiss that wasn’t in any of his spectacular plans. He lays Raylan out in the back of the truck and kisses him with coal dust still on his lips, and it’s almost enough to draw the acid mine water out of Raylan’s belly, to fill his chest with something besides ash and coal. It’s almost enough.

Raylan leaves that night. He’s waited nearly twenty years, and he’s seen them both bare inches from their graves. He doesn’t plan to make history. He was never the one reaching for the sky.

He watches the TV, sometimes. Winona thinks Raylan has an obsession with NASA and Kentucky politics.

“I bet you wanted to be an astronaut,” she says, smiling at him, no doubt seeing a little boy with an uneven bowl haircut and big dreams.

Raylan shrugs, doesn’t deny it. “I wanted to be a lion,” he says instead, thinks of a little boy with dark hair and an uneven bowl cut practicing his roar. He never does tell her what he’s looking for. He never sees Boyd Crowder’s name, not until twenty years have gone by and Art Mullen hands him a case file.

“What do you think he wants?” Art wonders, flipping through the file, Boyd Crowder’s name printed across the top in black ink.

Raylan stares past Art to the _Tombstone_ poster on the wall. “I think he wants to make history,” he tells Art, rubbing at the ache in his chest, licking the coal dust from his lips. “Just you wait and see.”


End file.
